Friday, June 1, 2018

Male, pale and stale - a despised minority

I am writing this column as a
member of a despised minority. I will be 68 next birthday. I’m fair of skin and
male of sex.

To put it another way, in the
language of “progressive” millennials and people who, with no sense of irony,
describe themselves as liberals, I’m male, pale and stale.

There is no more crushing
condemnation in the 21st century political lexicon. To be male, pale
and stale is to be racist, sexist, bitter and selfish. Don Brash and Sir Bob
Jones are prime examples of this wretched form of humanity. I am too, albeit of
a lower order of celebrity.

It goes without saying that I
can’t help being old. I can no more control the ageing process than I could
dance the prima ballerina’s role in Swan
Lake. Neither did I have any say over my ethnicity or sex.

Perhaps if I’d been born six
decades later I might have been encouraged to decide for myself what gender I
wanted to assume and to alter my sexual identity at will, regardless of
physiology. But I’ve been a bloke all my life and it’s a bit hard to re-invent
myself at this point in my life cycle.

Having said that, I’ve been
happy being a male and never felt any desire to have it any other way. Nor have
I felt ashamed about it, which is not to say I’m not regularly appalled by the
behaviour of some of my fellow blokes.

Moreover, I don’t hate or fear
women and have never felt that I was in competition with them, still less perceived
them as a threat. So I’m not sure that I deserve the implied accusation that
men like me are by definition misogynistic.

The women who have been
closest to me throughout my life have been stroppy and strong-willed. If I
preferred women to be submissive, I’ve been either desperately unlucky or
spectacularly unwise.

But never mind all that. I’m
stuck with being a bloke, just as I’m stuck with my skin colour and my
inexorably advancing age. Yet I, and others like me, now find ourselves
regularly being pilloried for having the temerity to express an opinion about
things. It seems we’re expected to shut up.

Let’s unpick that phrase
“male, pale and stale”. The first thing you notice is that it explicitly
criticises people on the basis of their skin colour.

Ah, but that’s okay, because we’re
white. And as I heard a moronic talkback host assert recently, only minority
groups – i.e. non-whites – can be subject to racism.

You can forget all that warm,
inclusive talk on the Left about celebrating diversity. The embrace of
diversity mysteriously stops short of ageing white blokes. We’re the one
demographic cohort against whom it’s permissible – in fact fashionable – to
display undisguised and often venomous bigotry.

In any other context,
attacking people on the basis of their age, sex and skin colour would be
labelled a hate crime, but no one should expect the Human Rights Commission to
take up our cause.

Being white and male, we are
seen as being in a position of power and therefore unscathed by discrimination
and immune to insult. And if we are discriminated
against, we’re expected to suck it up because … well, because we deserve it.

Ageing white males are
considered fair game because we’re seen as having enjoyed privilege for too
long. Now the tables have turned and we’re expected to pay the penalty by
keeping our supposedly rancid opinions to ourselves.

This treats freedom of
expression as a zero-sum game where one person’s right to speak can only be achieved
by silencing someone else. But that’s not how free speech works.

In any case, if white males
dominated newspaper opinion columns in past decades, as has been alleged, then
any imbalance has been more than redressed. The media today is awash with
comment that uncritically embraces the “progressive” agenda (there’s another
word that’s used with no sense of irony) and sneers at anyone who stands in its
path.

Am I pleading for sympathy
here? Not a bit. We curmudgeonly tuataras can look after ourselves. All I’m
doing is highlighting the double standards of social justice warriors who
shriek with outrage at any perceived slight against a favoured minority group,
but pile in for the attack when it’s an old white bloke who’s on the ground
getting kicked.

One last thought. Today’s
angry social justice warrior has a funny way of turning into tomorrow’s crusty
reactionary.

One day the people who rant
about ageing white men will themselves become old, and they can’t discount the
hideous possibility that they too will morph into conservative dinosaurs,
because by then they might have learned a few things about life, politics and
the human condition.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.